Years ago, just before I came here as pastor, I spent part of this third week of
Lent with the ecumenical community of Taizé. Taizé is located in the
rolling hills of the Burgundy region of France, not far from a place called
Cluny, arguably the greatest and most powerful monastery of the Middle Ages.

The ironies of history: Today, Cluny is in
ruins but a few miles down the road from it Taizé is flourishing, and has been
ever since the end of World War II when a Swiss Protestant gentleman by the name
of Roger Schutz began this unique monastic community. Taizé has about 100
brothers, both Protestant and Catholic, and it's dedicated to being a sign of
reconciliation and a model for unity in a church and a world badly torn and
racked by division.

Over the years, millions of pilgrims, most of them
young people, have made their way to Taizé to witness this unique community and
to imbibe its remarkable spirit. Among the pilgrims have been Pope John
Paul II and, before him, Pope John XXIII who used to refer to Taizé as "that
little Springtime."

Taizé was a "springtime" for me personally when I
went there in March of 1988. It was just a few months before I came here as
pastor and, to be honest, I was feeling more than a little anxious and
inadequate about what I was getting into! Happily, Taizé was just what I needed:
an oasis of peace and calm. I remember so well sitting in the church there one
morning and reading the passage we just heard from John’s gospel, the beautiful
story of Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus
became very real to me as he spoke of living water, the gift of God, and
reminded me that all my anxieties were really pointless, and that all my
thirsting could be satisfied by him, the living water.

I went away from Taizé refreshed and renewed in hope
and confidence.

Every year on this Third Sunday of Lent, the Church
gives us the story of the Woman at the Well. For a very good reason. We
are right in the midst of our Lenten journey: some among us are preparing for
the waters of Baptism which will flow over them just a month from now. The
rest of us are preparing to renew our Baptismal commitment: to stand once again
as we will on Easter and publicly own that Jesus is for us the way, the truth
and the life.

In many ways, the story of the woman at the well is
a wonderful Baptism story: it's the story of a woman who discovers the
deepest kind of thirst in her life, deeper by far than the thirst for water.
It's the story of a woman coming to faith through meeting Jesus; discovering the
emptiness of her life without him; turning her life over to him decisively,
almost recklessly.

The church would like us to see something of
ourselves in the Samaritan woman. That may seem a bit far-fetched at
first, but it really isn't. Look at her all by herself at the village well
under the blazing midday sun. There's a loneliness about her -- a sad
isolation. She's not popular in her village, that's for sure. If she
were she would have been drawing her water in the cool of the early morning with
the rest of the women of the village. No, she's something of an outcast,
this woman. Her life appears out of order. She's been running from one
dissatisfying relationship to another, and no one of them has brought her peace
or happiness.

And then Jesus comes along and challenges her to
take a new look at the thirsts of her life -- to stop running, to stop living on
the surface, to stop drinking from wells that promise to satisfy (and do seem at
first to satisfy), but which in the end only increase her thirst. He
challenges her to turn from all of this and to begin drawing water from a well
that gives "living water," to use his expression: "Water leaping up from within
to provide eternal life."

Jesus challenges us to the same, my friends.
We are really not all that different from the Samaritan woman. Our lives
can get pretty unfocused and out-of-order. Often they lack a center where
there is quiet and peace and calm. Instead, there can be an almost frantic
quality about them. Maybe we don't run from one relationship to another as the
woman did, but "run" we surely do: from ourselves, from our
responsibilities, from healthy relationships, even sometimes from God. We run
and we thirst. And today, Jesus let us run right into him, and in doing so, we
find living water, the only water that will ever satisfy all our thirsts.

My friends in Christ, the Samaritan woman, after
many attempts at love, found in Jesus one love: one single, satisfying,
faithful love that was deeper than any of the shallow ones she'd settled for
previously. And we can find the same. Or, even better, He’s the one who
finds us! He finds us right now and invites us to approach the table of the
Eucharist, and he says to us, "Whoever drinks the water I give will never again
be thirsty."